


my hand is fate, my word is law

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Category: Arthurian Mythology & Related Fandoms, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)
Genre: Discussion of Canon-Typical Murder, F/M, Future Arthur/Maggie, Gen, Taxes, is this the ONLY fic in the arthur & maggie tag, y'all good?????
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:33:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26022712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: “Appreciate it, Maggie,” Arthur had said, gripping her shoulder with a calloused hand, like she was any of the scruffy loyalists who stormed the castle on his word.  “And it’s Arthur, by the way.”“Of course, my lord,” Maggie had said.And then she hadn’t talked to him again for a week.Maggie learns the shape of her new reality, in the wake of Vortigern's death.
Relationships: Arthur (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword) & Maggie (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword), Arthur/Maggie (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 60





	my hand is fate, my word is law

**Author's Note:**

> If you recognize the title, you've already had the end of the fic spoiled so congrats on your excellent taste in music.

Maggie hasn’t actually talked to the Born King all that much, since he was found. She spoke with him once, briefly, when she went to warn Bedivere in the forest, but only in passing. Then again, after the battle was over, because she had happened upon him looking over the ruined mage tower with a bemused expression. She had lowered her head automatically and bobbed a curtsey, teeth gritted as she maintained her usual grace against the burning ache of the knee that one of the Blacklegs kicked out from under her, on her arrest.

“Your Majesty,” she had said, holding the curtsey and her skirt, so that the cloth hid the way her knee shook.

“Technically, pretty sure you can’t call me that ‘til Bedivere manages to make me hold still long enough for the crown,” he had said, with that absent street drawl, and then a hand had landed on her elbow. Maggie hadn’t jumped, because she was better trained than that when she was sixteen and she’s lived a decade in Camelot itself, the belly of the beast, and she was better that showing fear.

Arthur had still let her go, though, just as quickly as he’d caught her. “Stand up,” he had said, and Maggie realized, slowly, that he’d meant to pull her upright. “You just got out of a dungeon,” he’d added as she obeyed, straightening and raising her head to look somewhat fixedly at a point above her king’s shoulder. Arthur hadn’t seemed to notice—instead, he’d looked back at the mage tower.

“An impressive feat, my lord,” she had said, and the compliment rolled off her tongue without thinking, as smooth and flattering as she had learned to speak over the past ten years. But Arthur hadn’t looked at her or smiled or even acknowledged the words.

“You know the palace, right?” he’d asked, and hadn’t waited for an answer before going on. “I heard the Gaulish silver for the capstone was already making it here. If you know where it is, I think we’d better find out how much he paid for it.”

“Of course, my lord,” Maggie had said evenly, and he’d slanted a grin at her that looked more than a little mad in the flickering light of the mage tower—all those runes and magics, burning away in orange and blue.

“Don’t worry, I’m not looking to get rich. We’re going to need to cough up for some reparations, if we want anyone to trust the crown again. And if we can’t return the silver, we’ll need someone to melt it down and see if we can sell it again, get some money back. Think you can find it?”

Maggie had paused for a moment, and then said, “I don’t need to, my lord. I know the merchant who took delivery. He should still have it on his barge.”

“And is his barge still floating?”

Maggie had felt a cool, smooth smile curve her lips, without touching her eyes. “For the moment, my lord.”

“Appreciate it, Maggie,” Arthur had said, gripping her shoulder with a calloused hand, like she was any of the scruffy loyalists who stormed the castle on his word. “And it’s Arthur, by the way.”

“Of course, my lord,” Maggie had said.

And then she hadn’t talked to him again for a week. Not even while the pyres burned, all the loyalists and Blacklegs laid out side by side while Maggie and Arthur stood not even an arm’s reach from one another. But then, no one’s gotten much out of Arthur since the battle. Camelot’s been a storm of activity, and the Born King has been the apparently inexhaustible wind driving it. Anyone who doubted the potential for a brothel-raised street lord to take over in the wake of a revolution has either changed their minds or shut up about it.

Throne room? Dismantled. Blackleg captains and sergeants? Arrested, pending investigation. Foot soldiers? Turned off on provisional amnesty, as long as they took an oath of loyalty and swore to wait three years before attempting to gain work as a soldier again. Arthur has been everywhere, learning names, hearing cases from those few of Vortigern’s people bold enough to appeal to him for mercy, holding the loyalists together by sheer strength of will. Maggie thinks, privately, that even Bedivere is impressed with him.

No one has had particular work for Maggie, so she’d taken Katya’s trembling ladies-in-waiting under her protection and launched a quiet audit of the royal treasury. It’s taken her five days, even with the girls’ help and working nearly around the clock, but now it’s well past the last bell of the night and she’s sitting outside the door with a scribe’s writing board and a parchment scrupulously tallied with fraud.

A shadow falling across her lap makes Maggie snap her head up and start to jump to her feet, but Arthur drops down with a sigh before she can make it more than halfway. He’s sat on the other side of the door, dressed the same way she’s seen him every day this week—white shirt only barely better quality than the rough one he was first arrested in, functional pants and boots, Excalibur belted to his hip as the only acknowledgement of his rank.

“So, this is where you’ve been hiding out,” he says before Maggie can collect herself to answer.

“My apologies, my lord,” Maggie says, folding her hands automatically over her notes, a careful palm cupping the still-wet ink on her calculations and hiding them from view. “I wasn’t told you were hoping to speak with me. It won’t happen again.”

“Nah, stop that,” he says, gesturing her words away. “If I was looking for you, I’d just follow your little birds’ chirping. They’re a jittery bunch. Vortigern’s daughter’s maids?”

“Lady Katya’s ladies-in-waiting, my lord,” Maggie says, and it’s not—a correction, kings aren’t corrected, but Arthur nods anyway.

“They run like scared mice any time I end up in the same room,” he muses. “They’re running to you, huh?”

“They’re young, my lord.”

“Hostages?”

“Not as such, my lord.” Maggie hesitates, there, uncertain, but—Arthur is like his uncle, with that clear sight for the cleanest line from start to finish, but more dangerous, in his way, because Arthur has never overlooked someone below him as unimportant. Maggie doesn’t think she would be able to creep around aiding a revolution in Arthur’s court, under the mask of a hostage and a loyal servant of the crown. So she steels herself and says, “The daughters of Vortigern’s supporters, mostly. But they’re barely more than children. Innocent of their fathers’ loyalties. I won’t let—” she stops, gentles her voice through main force, changes tack. “It would reflect well on your mercy, my lord, if you spared them.”

Arthur slants her a sharp look, those clear eyes suddenly blazing as brightly as she’s seen his sword in battle, and Maggie feels a cold stillness settle over her like the first snow.

She is a survivor. She has stood at the side of the usurper king for ten years without showing fear. She has been beaten and imprisoned, and seen the fall of her home under the shadow of Camelot. 

Maggie will not flinch for the crime of protecting these girls. Not hostages in name, perhaps, but collateral against the good behavior of their families, and silk-swathed baubles on Katya’s prison walls. If this new king wants to call her a soft fool for it, let him. Maggie is as much a survivor as he can claim to be.

“I’m not going to fucking _execute_ them, Maggie!” Arthur says, too loud for the midnight corridor. He obviously makes an effort to lower his voice, but doesn’t sound any less outraged when he goes on in a hiss. “I’ll deal with their fathers, I’ll have to, but the king—Vortigern killed his whole family, or nearly, and not for lack of trying, so I’m sure he wouldn’t’ve been bothered by adding a couple nobles’ kids to the list.” 

Maggie is staring and she knows she’s staring, her eyes wide and her lips parted, just slightly, shock plain on her face, but Arthur is pushing himself away from the wall before she can say a word. Not to leave, but to pace, raking a hand back through his hair as if Maggie’s unintentionally cracked a dam.

“Is this what it’s going to be like, this—having to prove I’m not going to _murder_ anyone who knows someone with a friend who thought my uncle was a good king—or good for filling their pockets, at least. What am I saying,” Arthur says, face creasing into a scowl, “of course it is. I’m not looking to put girls on the chopping block, fucksake, how d’you even convince someone of that. I wouldn’t believe it if it were me and I were telling me that I was all good and free as a bird.” 

He takes a deep breath, pushes both hands through his hair and scrubs them over his face. “And the real bitch of it is, they’re not, actually, free to leave, they can’t go _home_ because I’m not planning to chuck them into their dad’s trials, so they’re stuck here or somewhere else safe ‘til I get through with those pompous pricks. _Christ_ ,” he almost shouts, coming to a stop like he’s run into a wall and whirling on Maggie. “Do _you_ want to go home? Because I’m not going to stop you if you’re hoping to leave.”

That question is so unexpected it takes Maggie’s breath away. She stands, slowly, taking care to protect her ink as she clasps her writing board in both hands, and makes herself set the question aside.

“I think that, regardless of how the girls might feel about their families, my lord,” she says, considering, “they don’t harbor any love for the king. They were close with Katya, you see.”

“Vortigern’s daughter.”

“Your cousin,” Maggie confirms. And then stops, because she’s coming dangerously close to secret ground now, but.

But.

Katya died for her father’s greed as surely as anyone, didn’t she? Her secrets aren’t helping anyone now.

“It was Katya who revealed me to her father,” Maggie says, as neutrally as she’s able. She sees the moment when it clicks in Arthur’s mind—half the castle saw Vortigern, bloodied and sobbing, carrying the body of his daughter into the depths of the dungeons, and drew appropriate connections to the mysterious vanishing of his wife nearly thirty years before. 

“Katya knew before anyone else did, how Vortigern bought the power to overthrow Uther Pendragon,” Maggie continues, and Arthur watches her with those dangerous clear eyes. “She may have known from childhood, I don’t know. She was lived nearly her entire life as a prisoner in these walls, protected from danger, so that her father would have one more coin in his treasury. Katya knew that she was as safe as her father’s grip on the throne, and that all her—all her fine jewels, and caged birds, and giggling ladies-in-waiting, they were just…window dressing.”

“She tried to save her own life by selling you out,” Arthur says.

“She was brilliant, you know,” Maggie says. “She could have been Vortigern’s finest advisor, if he let her be a whole person rather than a piece of insurance. She put it together all on her own, and met me at the door when I was arrested to tell me that she was sorry, but she loved her own life more than any ideal.” Maggie pauses. “We were friends. I can’t blame her for trying to live through this.”

“No,” Arthur mutters. “Guess not. Can’t imagine she expected her girls to live long if she died, either.”

“No,” Maggie agrees. “She kept them—carefully oblivious, but she knew it wouldn’t matter. If he killed her, he would kill them next. But she begged her father for them whenever he talked of making new _alliances_. He could have taken sons, it would have been a more direct threat, but Katya asked for—for friends. So that she could do what she couldn’t have with boys—protect them by keeping them close, and keeping them in the dark.”

“Friends,” Arthur repeats, rolling the word around in his mouth and tasting it, and then—

“Did she ask for you, too, then?”

Maggie feels one corner of her mouth tug upward like it’s happening to someone else. It’s a humorless expression, but she sees Arthur mirror it, as if they’re old comrades sharing a black joke on the eve of battle.

“No,” Maggie says. “But it was me—my situation—that gave her the idea.” Arthur lifts his brows, prompting, leaning against the wall across from her, and Maggie tries to arrange the words that she’s never had to tell anyone. “My father was…loyal,” she says slowly. “To the king. Your father. His name was Leodegrance. A lord to the north. In Wales. Almost eleven years ago, he tried to raise a rebellion. He couldn’t bear to watch his people starving, while the Blacklegs taxed them half to death…”

She trails off, the words dying on her lips, and then blinks twice, swallows down _he was my father, he was a good man_ , and makes her voice crisp when she speaks again.

“He failed, of course,” she says. “He was executed, and my cousin, Guiomar, was made lord in his place. But Vortigern worried that Guiomar needed—encouragement, to remain cooperative. I was taken from my father’s execution to the castle at Camelot, and as far as I know, Guiomar has never caused trouble. The public fiction was that I was a representative of the people, serving at court to keep their concerns close to the king’s ear, and I played my part to the hilt. I think even Vortigern believed it, eventually.”

“You must be an excellent liar.”

“I’m a phenomenal liar, my lord,” Maggie says, lifting her chin and meeting his eye. “So believe me when I tell you that, if I wanted to hide the truth of my girls from you, you wouldn’t know it.” She gives that a moment to settle. 

Then: “Marise of Rochefort is loyal to her father because she loves him, but she panicked herself into a fainting fit after Katya died and will trust you if you honor Katya as a king’s daughter. So will Dolores. Ruth’s father is a bastard who beat her, she can tell you everything you might care to know about the fine lord of Kent and his extra taxes that Vortigern didn’t know about. Janet is in love with a Blackleg sergeant who was pressed into service to save his mother, they’ll both be happy with a pardon and permission to marry. She can put you in contact with her father, Lord Carterhaugh, who’s been helping to smuggle escaped slaves south. Gillian may be a problem, she believes her father is a good man and she’ll swallow anything whole if he says it’s right, and he was all in for Vortigern. Christiana is the same.”

Arthur’s eyebrows climb steadily as she gives her report, his eyes fixed on her face, and then his eyes snap down to her hands as she holds out her writing board.

“What’s this?”

“A full audit of Vortigern’s personal treasury, my lord,” Maggie says. “I recruited the girls to help me. I paired the ones whose loyalties are—questionable with those who wouldn’t dare lie to me, so you may rest assured that it’s quite accurate.” Arthur takes it, and his lips part at the sum circled at the bottom. “Much of it is stolen, of course.”

“I’m sure,” Arthur says. “Hell, some of it was mine before he burned a quarter of Londinium looking for me.” He looks back up at her. “You never did answer my question.”

“What question is that, my lord?”

“You were doing _such_ a great job not calling me that,” he says, a mild scold in his voice, and Maggie silently cocks an eyebrow at him, doing her best impression of blank confusion. “No, see,” he says, waving the board at her. “I’m onto you. Suspected all along, but now you’ve confessed it all to me. It’s like you’ve never lied to a king before.”

“I’ve lied to more kings than you have, my lord,” Maggie says, and he smiles at her, the confident smirk she’s seen him direct at anyone who amuses him, even Vortigern. But there’s no use playing stupid, now that she’s gone and admitted everything, just like he said. “I’ve no idea if Guiomar was playing loyal for my sake or if he really stood with Vortigern,” she says with a shrug. “Besides, I’ll hardly be more use there, my lord.”

“That’s going to need to stop if you’re planning to stay here.”

“You’d like me to stay, my lord?”

“You kidding? I’m thinking about hiring you to do my books,” Arthur says, skimming her calculations. “Or maybe do my negotiations, you’d think none of these idiots had ever had to play nice with someone they hated. If your cousin isn’t crawling the walls looking to get you back, he’s as thick as an ox.”

Maggie can’t help a faint smile at that. “You flatter me, my lord.”

Arthur looks up from her notes at last and says, “I really don’t. If you want to stay here at the castle, you’re free to stay as long as you like. I need someone to keep your girls from having some kind of fit and running off to beg their fathers to come storm my gates, and if you lived ten years helping the rebellion under Vortigern’s nose, you’re the kind of person I want with a seat at the table while we try to fix everything he broke.”

“He broke more than you realize, my lord.”

“Noticed that myself, but thanks so much for the information.” 

The king is grinning properly now, wide and cheerful, standing just to the side of a torch so that the light falls on his rumpled hair and plain white shirt and bright eyes. Maggie notices, suddenly, with something of a shock, that he’s handsome, in a careless, slightly scruffy kind of way. He’s crowned in red and gold, shoulders even and strong, and she thinks, with a sense of the ground moving under her feet, that he’s out in the middle of the night, checking on a woman whose status is barely more than a servant and asking intelligent questions about loyalties and finances, and she’s never given her loyalty to a king in her life, but—

“I would be honored, my lord,” Maggie says, and gives him what feels like the first smile she’s meant in ten years.

“Arthur,” he says, holding his hand out as if sealing a bargain.

“If you insist. I suppose you’ve already been calling me Maggie,” she says, and then stops, her hand half-extended toward him. “Or—as long as I’m telling secrets,” she adds, hesitantly. “I lied to Vortigern, that first day. Told him that everyone called me by my middle name. Margaret.”

“Why?” Arthur asks, keeping his grip on her hand as his eyes sweep her face.

“I hated hearing him say my name,” she says plainly. It’s the only thing she’s done for no reason but her own comfort in ten years. She firms her grip on Arthur’s hand and shakes it solemnly. “My father was Leodegrance of Cameliard, and my mother was his lady wife Marared. They called me Guinevere.”

**Author's Note:**

> Now that you're down here, the title is from Guinevere's verse of Gunfight at the Dolorous Guard, by the Mechanisms! Find me [on Tumblr!](https://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/) There's only like fifty-three people in this fandom anyway, come talk to me.


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